With increasing frequency, data is migrating to the cloud and much of the data in the cloud is maintained in datacenters. Datacenters are typically large facilities that have the capacity to store extremely large amounts of data from a large number of different users. The amount of data stored in a datacenter can be very large (e.g., on the order of Petabytes).
Datacenters are often used to backup data. Once a user has backed up data to the datacenter, the datacenter has the responsibility to maintain the data such that the data is available when needed and such that the data can be restored. However, maintaining the data is challenging at least because data is continually being added to the datacenter and because the user's data often changes. In addition, hardware issues may often occur in datacenters and data or portions thereof are frequently lost.
For example, a user may upload a group of files to a datacenter. Over time, the user may delete some of the files, change some of the files, or add new files. A quality backup system will be able to successfully backup the user's data regardless of the actions taken by the user.
However, this process of maintaining data in the datacenter is quite complicated for many reasons. For example, storage devices fail in a datacenter as previously stated. The data on those storage devices is therefore lost and it becomes necessary to replace the lost data. In addition, attempts may be made to deduplicate the data. As a result, the loss of a storage device or the loss of a particular piece of data may impact multiple users. In addition, datacenters often have a significant amount of data that becomes garbage data (data that can be deleted) over time. The ability to identify and remove the garbage data is a time consuming process and fraught with problems. Data that is garbage with respect to one user may be valid data with respect to another user. As a result, a datacenter must exercise care when deleting data. Systems and methods are needed to streamline and improve datacenter management.